EBC22 | Building On Blockchain Infrastructure

[Music] [Applause] hey everyone good afternoon i'm luke dorney i'm head of business development in europe for block damon good to speak to you this afternoon what i'm going to do is give you a bit of an overview of the blockchain infrastructure world and what it is to to run a blockchain business a blockchain infrastructure business and how we can help facilitate your your blockchain needs probably what we want to get across today is if you're building a blockchain project if you're already in blockchain and you have infrastructure there are certain ways you can utilize blockchain infrastructure companies to really help scale your business and really over the next 10 minutes um just give you a bit of a an overview of of of how we're scaling up as a business and how we're supporting clients uh through that journey um one of the key things maybe to start with is you know what is our mission what we're trying to achieve as a blockchain infrastructure company and um really what we're trying to do is connect institutions to blockchains uh through one integration so what that means is you know really make it as easy and safe as possible for clients to access blockchains and really kind of weigh up that decision of do they build that themselves or do they you know trust an outsourced provider to actually execute their projects on on blockchain and really we're here to help support that outsourced piece and and kind of where are we going with this i mean you know we believe that you know blockchain use cases are revolutionary for the world in general we see many use cases coming through our desk across many many multiple different client types and really what we want to do is is give those our clients the economic opportunity to to execute on their business models and really give them the infrastructure to help them to do that so just to give you a bit of a scale as to what a blockchain infrastructure company looks like like us and we're one of the leading infrastructure firms in this space we've got about 270 employees and really what i would say is if you wind that back a year ago we had around 60 employees so you can see the scale that we've gone through over the last over the last year or so and that's purely down to client demand uh and really kind of the the projects that we're seeing launched in this space and and what that culminates in is that we've deployed over 35 000 nodes across 70 70 different points of presence around the world and we're supporting over 50 blockchain protocols and over 200 customers and that has grown significantly over the last year so who cares right who who cares about blockchain infrastructure and what the type of companies that one have invested in our business and two are utilizing our infrastructure and i think from here you'll be able to see that um this is really a mixture of crypto native firms and traditional institutions coming into this space so it should all become really comforting for the people in this room if you see our cap table on the left hand side and and the the uh the funds that we've raised over the last couple of years is a real mixture of those of those financial institutions and uh crypto native firms maybe just to call out you know some of the banks you know softbank goldman sachs jp morgan city are all on our cap table and essentially have invested in a blockchain infrastructure company and you can see there that they're you know really thinking about infrastructure um and you know most of the people most of the firms on our cap table are looking either utilizing us for infrastructure or thinking about how they will utilize our infrastructure to execute on their projects so what does the evolving product look like across a an infrastructure firm so we started off our business as a node infrastructure uh provider um you know giving access to clients to be able to read and write transactions on chain rather than building those those that infrastructure themselves and and deploying and maintaining their own nodes that was really how we started the company we then shifted into in 21 and 22 into staking infrastructure and really supporting that exponential growth of the staking industry across proof of stake networks and we now support actually above 30 pro proof of stake protocols for for uh for you know providing infrastructure for our clients to get access to yield and we're taking it a step further in terms of supporting our client base around yield generation and we'll get into a little bit later as to what that actually means so why outsource um you know a lot of the existing clients that we talk to whether they be exchanges trading firms lenders custodians predominantly probably set up their own node infrastructure if they've been in this business for uh for quite a while what we're seeing now is a way up of a decision around um looking at your existing infrastructure and seeing how you can scale up and really look at all of the growth that's happening in this market and and see where you can actually deploy your dollars uh to make sure that you're either facilitating your client activity or do are you really spending too much time on on maintaining your node infrastructure uh for your projects and you know would it be easier for you to actually outsource that to a company like us that is that's solely what we do right we have we concentrate on node infrastructure we're deep rooted in a lot of the protocols and we understand how to maintain these services so if you were a a firm that's looking at blockchain infrastructure or you are already in this space and are running your own infrastructure what would be the easiest way that you could actually connect with us and utilize our infrastructure either as a alternative to your own infrastructure or um [Music] actually you know deploying full interest infrastructure through us so we have a product called ubiquity that allows our clients to access multiple blockchains through one entry point and through one platform allows you to query data on chain allows you to broadcast transactions for different use cases and you know a lot of our clients are starting to utilize this and see this as a as a real good entry point into outsourcing and easy for you to actually deploy across multiple blockchains and what we're seeing is multiple use cases across this and just as an example around one of the use cases that we're seeing for this product and it kind of um leads on from the the panel earlier is um our clients are looking for additional data sets right and and nfd to nft data is one of the things that is really important to our clients and um really what they're looking for is an independent source of data across ownership traceability and audibility and that that's quite difficult to get but there's a lot of on train and off chain data and you really need a trusted source to actually gather that data and that's one of the things that we're putting together as part of this um ubiquity um data set um one of the use cases and we're going to see plenty more use cases as blockchain use cases expand over the coming year or so one of the main elements to our business is staking and obviously you've probably heard a lot about staking over the last day or two but our clients who are token holders or our clients clients who are token holders um really want to earn yield on their assets and our very verifying transactions on proof of stake networks and they're they're compensated for uh locking up those assets to stake those assets on chain and really to do that you either need to run your own validator or work with a provider that helps you actually get access to to to staking and um as part of our infrastructure we can offer you uh annual and well we offer institutions the ability to run uh public uh to state directly to our public validators or run white labeled validators themselves to actually manage that for their existing clients and stake assets to over 30 different protocols really difficult to maintain yourself each protocol has different requirements around validator sets and for you to be able to earn rewards through those validators extremely difficult for you to keep that up running and we guarantee across all the risk mitigations on that so if protocols are imposing certain slashing rules uh which which essentially cut into your uh to cut into your rewards um we we provide a lot of um guarantees around that uh and we cover that 100 so our our infrastructure um helps you kind of mitigate those risks and we integrate with various different custodians uh one of the challenges around staking is you know moving your asset keeping your assets at your custodian and being able to stake those assets on chain uh and making sure that you um you you earn your rewards um but your assets stay with your custodian and we're a non-custodial staking provider which which facilitates that process and through that period you know uh one of the the key uh elements is to actually see how how many rewards you've earned while staking um so if you're using a provider they should be able to be telling you how your rewards have been earned over that period we're taking that a step further in terms of staking so we are setting up an ecosystem with a company called stakewise which allows you to stake your eth assets and utilize those um and and and compound returns in different liquidity pools um we're just setting that up at the moment we're working with exchanges um custodians um liquidity providers and you know we've just launched that so if you're interested in in how that works please hit me up after this lastly as an infrastructure provider we're always looking at ways to facilitate our clients across the entire uh chain of of of services um so we've spoken about infrastructure node infrastructure we've spoken about staking and yield um we're also we've also just acquired a company which allows our clients to get their clients um from fiat to crypto so we're providing the technology stack underneath to be able to move your ass move your clients assets in your app from fear to crypto and we believe as an infrastructure provider um that's part of the um part of the challenge that our clients see so just to wrap up um if you're thinking about node infrastructure and you've got blockchain projects if you're thinking about earning yield and you don't know how to kind of get there from a from an infrastructure perspective and if you really want to look at um how you get your clients from uh fiat to crypto and how that how technology could support that uh let us know we'd love to build together cheers